After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction.

— either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old — even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.